Deep in the frozen heart of…

Deep in the frozen heart of Antarctica, the South Pole Telescope has been watching one of the most extreme neighborhoods in our galaxy, and it's just caught something extraordinary happening there. Astronomers have detected powerful stellar flares erupting from stars near the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way. These aren't your average stellar flares, we're talking about energy releases so intense they make our sun's most dramatic outbursts look like flickering candles.

The research team, led by scientists at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, monitored the galactic center over multiple observing seasons. They were looking for transient events such as flashes that appear and disappear relatively quickly. The research is published in The Astrophysical Journal.